Engineers, it appears think they know everything. People who deal in petty generalizations are frequently wrong. In fact, most generalizations are wrong, including this one.
Yes, it seems that many wrong headed decisions are made from bad conclusions from good data. It could be called the phenomena of irrelevance, or the lack of a scientific method. If people followed from thesis to experiment construction to rightful conclusion, they would not make these kind of knee jerk responses to observation. Here are some examples. Military people observe that most effective kills are made at below 400 yards. They therefore decide to make military weapons so that they shoot no more than 400 yards effectively. But this says nothing about whether or not degrading the performance of the weapon is necessary, or likely to improve performance. The one fact found is unrelated to the reaction to it. In another test, educators find that students learn or remember syllables that make sense many times better than nonsense syllables. So they decide to teach reading "globally" as a group of syllables that make sense when strung altogether and to drop the phonetic component of reading, as it added nothing to the sense of the word. So they thought. Greater understanding of the how the word resonates in the sonic portion of the brain would have given the lie to this simplistic thinking, and explained dyslexia too, but this research was never done.
It was thought by some leaders that developing countries could manufacture cheaper with cheap labour than we could, so why try to compete? It begs the question of why export successful industries or worry at all about other countries? It is your own you have to live in and what do you do, if not manufacture and sell things? It is apparent that in many countries service sector rises as they get more mature. But 80% of that service sector is actually ballooning governments. In Canada 70% of the business world is service. But 65% of the GDP is the civil service. For service economy, read government economy.
Canada is in genuine trouble. What do we make and what do we export? Wheat. some. Cars. Dicey. Fish. not much. Agricultural produce.. some. Heavy manufactured goods. Not much any more. Minerals and metals. Dying. Aircraft. A tad. Oil. A bit. Engineering serivices.. not to any great profit. Software.. not much.. High Tech.. don't do the research. Wood.. coming to an end..
We had better get on the bus and decide what it is that pays the bills and do it with a vengeance or we are headed to third world status. It is apparent that the Federal government surplus was obtained by starving the provinces. We are out of money and falling fast. We had better start emphasis on some industry that pays the bills that we have a definite advantage at. And do it soon.
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